NEXTILE Design Challenge
In its inaugural year, the NEXTILE Design Challenge invited design students across the US to leverage their creative and problem-solving skills to produce the next sustainable innovation in textile design. The catch? Students must create their products using one versatile ingredient — soybeans. Each participating individual or team received a design kit including seven sustainable, soy-based materials: soy thread, soy leather, soy French Terry, organic pigment and other soy products. Project submissions leveraged one or more of these ingredients to produce new textile threads, dyes, paints, designs and more.
U.S. Soy has long been a key ingredient for product innovation, going all the way back to Henry Ford who used soy-based paints, textile materials and plastics for automobile design. And today, U.S. Soy is used in more than 1,000 products on the market — from tires and shoes to fabrics and artificial grass. As a renewable crop grown on U.S. farms, and replenishing the soil annually with each growing season, soy is an important frontier for bio-based products.
Image: NEXTILE winner, Kasandra Wright. Image above: second-place runner-up, Anna Stuffelbeam of North Carolina State University, foliage appliqué sample inspired by the plants that made up her fabric’s materials — soy, pomegranate and madder.
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